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Against all hegemons, save
one
By Ehsan Ahrari
Erick
Margolis, a syndicated columnist based in Canada,
recently wrote an interesting essay titled "No nukes or
missiles for Muslims". He observed: "It is all right for
nations like Britain, France, China, Russia, India and
Israel to have powerful missile forces and nuclear
weapons, but not, according to Washington, for Muslim
nations to acquire modern strategic weapons. Anyone that
does, like Pakistan, will be severely punished."
His observation is only partially correct. The
underlying US rationale for denying nuclear weapons and
missiles is more complicated than that. A better
explanation may be to view it from the perspective of
clashing aspirations of wanna-be regional hegemons and a
world-class hegemon that wants no competition,
especially from those countries that reject its primacy
in their regions to begin with. For Iran and Iraq, there
is another reason for Washington's apprehension.
Since the end of World War II, when the United
States emerged as the legitimate heir to the
disintegrating pax Britannica, it envisaged a
definite role for itself in the Muslim Middle East and
Southwest Asia. A compact between president Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and the legendary Saudi King Abdul Aziz
was the beginning of a long-lasting friendship. The
United States guaranteed the existence of the Saudi
monarchy, while the latter agreed to serve as the
provider of much-needed oil to America's European allies
and Japan.
The rebuilding of the European and
Japanese economies was to become an integral aspect of
the United States' policy of containment. In fact, its
dealings with Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 1970s were
characterized by its unwillingness to prefer one
explicitly over the other. The official name for that
subtlety was the "twin pillar policy", which, in
reality, rested more on Mohammad Reza's Iran than on
Saudi Arabia for regional stability. The then-evolving
Iranian regional hegemony had America's tacit approval.
However, when the Islamic revolution cast the Iranian
monarchy in the dustbin of history, Washington shifted
the focus of its regional policy to Saudi Arabia.
But the Iranian revolution itself shattered the
conventional balance of power-related perspectives of
the United States. Radical Islam (variably referred to
as "political Islam" or "Islamism") was to emerge as a
new challenge. But that reality did not fully emerge
until the end of the Cold War. Interestingly enough, the
United States deftly used radical Islamist forces in
Pakistan and Afghanistan for the operationalization of
the "Reagan Doctrine" - which was aimed at defeating
global communism - to bring about an ignominious
expulsion of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
However, the implosion of the Soviet Union and
the concomitant end of the Cold War, instead of bringing
about the "end of history" that was wistfully and
wrong-headedly proposed by Francis Fukuyama, initiated a
new era when Islam - or its radical version - challenged
the political status quo. The end of the Cold War also
resulted in the emergence of a unipolar global order
where the United States was the lone superpower. Thus,
any challenge to the political status quo in any part of
the world also meant challenging the hegemony of the
United States.
There ensued a series of new
regional games of tug-and-pull in the Middle East,
Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. The post-Cold
War era also created new "villains" for Washington. The
"twin pillar" policy was replaced by the "dual
containment" policy, whereby the United States was to
contain Iran and Iraq, especially after the Gulf War of
1991, which was the direct outcome of Saddam Hussein's
hegemonic designs. He had recently "won" the Iran-Iraq
War (thanks to the United States' siding with Iraq), and
wanted to cap his victory by absorbing the oilfields of
Kuwait and the emirate itself into his empire. During
the presidency of Bill Clinton, the phrase "rogue
states" was introduced to include Iran, Iraq, North
Korea and Libya. All these countries wanted to develop
WMD (weapons of mass destruction) capabilities of their
own, and they also rejected the dominance and primacy of
the United States in their respective regions.
In the post-Cold War years, Washington also
intensified its endeavors to create a variety of
international regimes aimed at making it well nigh
impossible for all Third World countries - but
especially the so-called rogue states - to develop WMD
capabilities, including acquisition of ballistic-missile
technology. The rationale was that the coupling of
ballistic missiles and chemical and/or biological
weapons would also result in the creation of WMDs.
The US non-proliferation endeavors, as global
and multilateral as they were, suffered a major jolt
when India and Pakistan conducted nuclear explosions of
their own in 1998, and became nuclear powers. The
"apartheid nuclear club", which India had decried for
decades, all of a sudden looked rather less apartheid.
The forced entry of India and Pakistan into the
nuclear club was a major source of concern for
Washington for at least two reasons. First, it
established a precedent that North Korea and other
"rogue states" were doing their best to emulate. Second,
an Islamic country, Pakistan, acquired nuclear weapons.
This was also a country where the acquisition of nuclear
weapons was explicitly couched in religious language by
the father of the idea of nuclear weapons for Pakistan,
the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. For South Asia, that type
of phraseology had a special meaning, since the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had long talked about the
probability of Hindu India becoming a nuclear power. But
Hinduism was never couched in revolutionary language,
whereas the Islamic revolution of Iran was assiduously
depicted by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as
eminently exportable to neighboring countries throughout
the 1980s. In this sense, the United States envisaged
the emergence of nuclear Pakistan as the beginning of an
era where other Muslim countries might want to emulate
that example.
While one can debate the
feasibility of the exportable aspects of the Iranian
revolution, the significant reality was that the lone
superpower envisaged it as such. In fact, the very
creation in the early 1980s of the United States Central
Command (CENTCOM - the military command that is
concerned with political stability of a number of
countries of the Middle East, Central and South Asia,
excluding India, which falls under the "area of
responsibility" of Pacific Command or PACOM) was aimed,
inter alia, at containing the potential
exportability of the Iranian revolution.
During
the 1980s and 1990s, the battle lines between Islamist
forces and the United States were being drawn. The focus
of US diplomacy in the early 1990s in Central Asia -
where the implosion of the Soviet Union created five
independent and predominantly Muslim states - was the
promotion of the Turkish secular model of government and
undermining of any attempts of Iran to export its model
of Islamic government. But it was the victory of the
Taliban in Afghanistan in 1996 that played a crucial
role in the intensification of the activities as well as
in broadening the agenda of Islamist forces.
To
be sure, Islamist groups of nuclear Pakistan played a
crucial role in educating the Taliban and their fellow
jihadists (ie, the forces that regard the creation of an
Islamist government as their foremost religious
obligation in Central Asia, in the Xinjiang province of
China and even in the Chechen Republic of the Russian
Federation).
Now the political agenda of the
Islamist forces was so broadening its horizons that even
the US government concluded that the prospects of its
global "reach" (in the context of the spread of ideas)
were real. It should also be recalled that throughout
the 1990s, there were a number of attacks on US
diplomatic and military personnel and facilities. The
alleged chief culprit was the Saudi billionaire turned
terrorist, Osama bin Laden, and his al-Qaeda
organization. The United States unsuccessfully attempted
to kill or capture him.
Then came the "mother of
all terrorist acts" - the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the United States, the superpower par excellence
that was generally regarded as invulnerable because of
its remoteness form the battlefields of the Middle East,
Asia and Africa. That date was the beginning of a major
paradigm shift. There followed a global war on
terrorism, and a palpably militant phase of US foreign
policy.
As the United States was getting ready
to launch military operations on Afghanistan - aimed at
capturing or killing bin Laden and dismantling the
Taliban regime, the chief allies of al-Qaeda - one
important concern was the security of nuclear weapons in
Pakistan. Because of the alleged permeability of the
pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda feelings in the government
circles of Pakistan, no one was certain that al-Qaeda
would not get access (accidentally or through the
activities of some rogue elements) to that country's
nuclear weapons.
The potential consequences of
such a scenario were ominous not only for the US forces
in and around Afghanistan but also for the entire South,
West and Central Asia. The Pakistani government
pooh-poohed such discussions. However, there were
unconfirmed reports that the US military was rehearsing,
with the Special Forces of Israel, to carry out a snatch
operation of those weapons. Even though Pakistan has
remained an important "frontline" ally in the war on
terror, no one in the US government has yet developed a
high degree of confidence about the security of nuclear
weapons in that country.
But the larger aspect
of the ownership of nuclear weapons by Pakistan, and the
prospects of acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and
Iraq, is that Washington always couches it in the larger
framework of the Islamic government. What if an Islamist
clique overthrows President General Pervez Musharraf?
This is not an exercise in fantasy. Pakistan's politics
are potentially explosive. There is a high degree of
support for al-Qaeda within its borders. There are
rumors that bin Laden is hiding in the North West
Frontier province - Pakistan's "wild wild West".
Islamist elements are part of the provincial government,
and important opposition in the national assembly. These
are some of the realities that continue to cast dark
shadows on the thinking of the decision makers in
Washington.
The animosity between the Islamist
forces and the United States is becoming legendary, and
is a pervasive part of current reality in almost all
Muslim countries. After all, the administration of
President George W Bush feels that it has been badly
burned on what turned out to be an increasingly
malevolent nature of Saudi Islamist forces.
The
issue involved is related to radical Islamism as much as
it is to the balance of power that will be so radically
tilted in favor of those countries that have an
established record of rejecting all aspects of US
hegemony. Yes, Israel has nuclear weapons, but its
regional hegemonic ambitions never clashed with the
realities of the US hegemony in the Middle East. In
fact, those who argue that the first is the extension of
the second may have a point.
No one in his right
mind in Washington would allow Iran's acquisition of
nuclear weapons. The US doctrine of "proactive
counterproliferation" will be enacted without much
public discussion. Similarly, there is no chance that
even a post-Saddam Iraq will be allowed to own nuclear
weapons.
It is well within the realm of
reasonability to argue that Washington's resolve to keep
Iran and Iraq from getting nuclear weapons is more about
disallowing them the prospects of regional hegemony,
which the United States may not able to challenge
without resorting to the threat of the use of nuclear
force, than the fact that they are Muslim. As long as
they don't have nuclear weapons of their own, their
threat potential vis-a-vis the United States and its
friends and allies remains low. Washington will be quite
content to ensure that that reality does not change any
time soon, if at all.
Ehsan Ahrari,
PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent
strategic analyst.
(©2002 Asia Times Online
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